As part of African-American celebration month, on Monday Feb. 7, guest speaker Dr. Henry Louis Taylor presented the history of distressed neighborhoods while describing his ideas to revitalize contemporary cities.

Taylor, a professor at the University of Buffalo, teaches urban and regional planning. He specializes in city and neighborhood development and has won several awards for his work.

Taylor gave a two-part lecture. The first part, from noon to 1 p.m., was about the restoration of shrinking cities and distressed neighborhoods. The second part, from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m., was about the historical roots of the problem.

Taylor voiced his thoughts on urban revitalization efforts in cities such as Buffalo and Detroit, including urban farming. He also talked about rebuilding cities, neighborhoods and communities and discussed what works and what does not work.

“We have to learn how to work collaboratively,” Taylor said.

Taylor said that in the past, the main task was to revolutionize the home-buying process. In order to create mass ownership, people had to find a way to stabilize the market.

Taylor said that the old model of metro development is broken. The creative city model is the current model, which is built around the idea that ordinary people can do extraordinary things if they are given support along with the right tools.

“We have to create a new paradigm,” Taylor said. “Urban leaders have to reimagine the urban metropolis.”

According to Taylor, in order to face the current challenges of urbanization, there needs to be economical, educational, and cultural development strategies.

Some local economic alternative development strategies that Taylor mentioned were increasing place-based business ownership, local consumption and economic activities driven by local enterprises. Another strategy was to capture local economic activities to spawn multipliers.

Taylor said that we need to increase the magnitude of spending in local areas, create trained business institutions and capitalize them. We also need to encourage and promote local enterprises, increase capture of economic activity, slow down the leakage of resources out of the city, and build an interactive network of entrepreneurs.

One educational strategy that Taylor gave was to create curriculums that would teach students to take what they learned in class and apply it to the real world.

“It was a powerful speech,” said Joe Saputo, a senior journalism student. “He is teaching kids how to build their own city. He is showing them how they can change their own reality.”

Karen Miller, the chair of the department of history, said Taylor is currently working on the urban organization and transitioning of cities.

Chelsea Smith, a junior studying secondary education in English, said she thought the lecture was interesting.

“Taylor showed how Detroit got to the way it did,” Smith said. “It is nice to know that people are working together to change the city.”

The lectures were sponsored by the department of history and the Center for Multicultural Initiatives.